Secrets Collide (Bluegrass Brothers)

the house and made it look like a family home instead of a bachelor pad.
    Before he could park, the front door opened and Ahmed walked out to greet him. Next to him a large pit bull stood at attention. “Zoti, go greet our friend,” Ahmed said in an unusually relaxed voice. The large dog wagged his tail and ran over to Cy. He sat down at Cy’s feet and raised a paw.
    “What a good boy you are,” Cy reached out and shook his paw before Zoti caught his face with a lick. “Nice dog, Ahmed. I kinda pictured him attacking me, though, not giving me kisses and wiggling around my legs.”
    “I thought you of all people would know not to judge something by its appearance. Zoti, alert.” Ahmed gave the quiet command and the dog’s demeanor changed in a split second.
    He was tense and scanning the area and Cy could easily see the well-trained protection dog within.
    “Relax. Good boy. Who’s a good boy?” Ahmed praised as he rubbed behind Zoti’s ears.
    “Impressive. I guess you’re right. I should've known better.” Cy walked up the steps and followed Ahmed into his surprising house. Another assumption he should not have made. He had expected dark and masculine with weapons lying around for some reason. Instead he found a home that was bright and welcoming. The walls were dark beige, the couch was red with navy accents, and the floor was a gleaming honeyed oak. Pictures from around the world were framed and hanging on the walls.
    “I’m sure you recognize some of those places,” Ahmed said as he handed Cy a beer.
    “I do. These are amazing.” The pictures played with lights, shadows, and angles in such a way as to captivate the observer.
    “Thank you.”
    “You took these?”
    “Judging by appearances again?” Ahmed almost cracked a smile. If he had, Cy would have thought he entered an alternate universe.
    “I guess so,” Cy turned and took a seat in a chair across from Ahmed, who sat on the couch with Zoti. “So, tell me about Sergei.”
     

CHAPTER ELEVEN
     
    Gemma cursed under her breath and threw her pen down. She had been working on translating her sister’s notebooks for the past three days and was still only getting bits and pieces. She remembered the alphabet Gia used to spell out a name or words that didn’t have specific symbols. But it was those symbols that were hanging up her translation.
    To make matters worse, she found a flash drive in the bottom of the box. Gemma worked all day yesterday and couldn’t even get the thing to open. She tried to think like Gia and tried to crack her password, but she had no luck.
    “Oh, bless your heart. It’s not going well, is it,” Miss Lily stated more than asked. “I just came inside from taking Dinky a snack and thought you might want some iced tea and cookies to help you while you work.” Miss Lily set the tray down on the chest of drawers and smiled understandingly at her.
    “No. It’s not. We grew up talking this language and then we made up this huge written language when she came home with this box. The trouble is, I haven’t used it in well over a decade. There were around seventy-five words we had symbols for—all the pronouns and so many adjectives. I just can’t finish translating without them.”
    Gemma paused and took a deep breath. “See, this sentence. Blank will be at the blank club on blank at eleven . I’m just glad I remembered the symbols for words like and and the or I wouldn’t even have this much and what I do have does us no good.”
    “Tell me when you came up with these symbols. Was it at home? Did you do it all at once or over the course of the year?” Miss Lily asked as she handed Gemma a cookie.
    “We were upstairs in our secret place. She sat down with this box and we agreed it would hold all our secrets. It was then that Gia suggested we make up a way to write in our secret language so we could pass notes at school. That way, if they were intercepted, no one could read them.”
    “What then?”
    Gemma thought back and envisioned the meeting. “We wrote down all the words we used frequently and then spent the whole night coming up with symbols for them.”
    “Lordy! How did you remember all of that?”
    “We didn’t . . .” Gemma paused and her heart started beating quickly. “We didn’t! I totally forgot about that. We had a master list that each of us looked over and practiced for weeks until we remembered everything. Then it became second nature. Gia learned it quickly but I had to use